The only thing is that I've had to manually install the forum because the install script won't work. So I install it on my local server and FTP the files over on the remote machine. Once it's there I modify the basic setup (globals.php files) and import the DB.

You'll probably want to know why it doesn't install and the quick answer to that is the hoster set the user groups in such a way that if the wwwapache modified a file's perms, that same group can't modify it back to whatever value you want. From what I could experience, that fubars the install big time.

Now, I really don't think this could be viewed as a perm problem since that file (globals.php) is 777 and is not part of the wwwapache group. It still can be modified by fudforum but it seems it only affect the perms changes. This is quite confusing, I know.

Anyway, as I was saying, I can modify the forum's settings and thus, it should work.

It was but that's the only way I was able to install the forum. Each and every file has a chmod, no file is unset and all files are saved with LF only. No CR/LF are in those files. Any files modified locally are mandatorily saved in UNIX format.

The problem is that GLOBALS.php file inside the forum's main dir and adm/ dirs are win32 specific hacks. You need to remove those files and replace them with symlinks to the "real" file inside include/ directory.